


Every Hour of the Light and Dark

by riverlight



Series: Things to Do in Juniper at One O'Clock in the Morning [2]
Category: due South
Genre: M/M, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-06
Updated: 2006-01-06
Packaged: 2017-10-26 15:11:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/284728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverlight/pseuds/riverlight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By the time his third winter in Juniper rolled around, Ray figured he was pretty prepared, or at least as prepared as he could be. By that point he'd had enough experience with the whole thing to know that, yeah, it'd be fucking <i>freezing, </i>and dark pretty much all the time, and generally miserable. And yeah, maybe he wasn't <i>thrilled </i>about it all, but he figured he could handle it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Every Hour of the Light and Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Rating probably PG, though there is mention of death, so if you're sensitive to that, you should maybe skip this one. (No one actually _dies,_ but still.) It's set in [Juniper](http://archiveofourown.org/works/280798), but this should make sense even if you haven't read that story; just know that Ray and Fraser live in Canada and Ray's a teacher. Lastly, title comes from Walt Whitman's poem [Miracles](http://quotations.about.com/cs/poemlyrics/a/Miracles.htm). As always, thanks to lozenger8 for beta—you rock, Loz!

By the time his third winter in Juniper rolled around, Ray figured he was pretty prepared, or at least as prepared as he could be. By that point he'd had enough experience with the whole thing to know that, yeah, it'd be fucking _freezing,_ and dark pretty much all the time, and generally miserable. And yeah, maybe he wasn't _thrilled_ about it all, but he figured he could handle it. He'd gotten two winters under his belt; it'd been, what, a solid fifteen months of winter all told, right? So he wasn't gonna be surprised by much.

Not that he thought it'd be easy; hell, this was the Northwest Territories, there was no such thing as an _easy_ winter. But it wasn't like there was much he could do about it, so he'd just deal with it, do what he had to, 'cause he wasn't going anywhere. So, yeah. That was that.

The first winter actually hadn't been that bad. Colder than Chicago, definitely, and a hell of a lot longer than Ray would have preferred, but all in all not that bad. For the first month or so the newness of it all had kept him distracted—there was ice fishing! and the northern lights! and eight-foot-tall snowbanks!—and after that, Christmas to look forward to, so it'd sort of flown by without him noticing. And yeah, after Christmas it'd pretty much sucked—five more months of freezing cold and near-total darkness was not his idea of fun—but Fraser's duties at the detachment were pretty slow at that point, and they'd spent a lot of time in front of the woodstove or in bed, so really, Ray couldn't complain. He'd slept a lot, and explored the woods on the edges of town, and hung out with Bob MacPherson and Jeannie, and before he knew it it was springtime.

And then the second winter—well, the second winter had been a lot worse, there was no two ways about it. Fraser'd had a whole explanation about weather patterns and climate change, but all Ray knew was that it was fucking freezing, and dark all the time, and it never seemed to end. He'd gone to work in the dark, and come home in the dark, and in between he'd stayed huddled up in a pile of blankets, feeling like he was going out of his mind. If he hadn't had school every morning, he probably wouldn't have gotten out of bed—and weekends, actually, he didn't, a lot of the time, to the point where Fraser'd been pretty worried about him. Turned out it was one of the hardest winters since they'd started keeping records in the 1800s sometime, so later when he thought back on it he figured he was justified in freaking out, but at the time he'd seriously thought he wasn't going to make it.

One of the things that kept him going, that winter—along with Jeannie Natoosiq's home-cooked stew and the kids at school and of course, always, Fraser—was the thought of springtime. He thought he'd appreciated springtime in Chicago—but man, it had nothing on springtime in Juniper. There was this total explosion of life, every year: birds everywhere, geese and ravens and tons of other birds he had no names for, and bears appearing in the woods, and lynx tracks by the river (not that he knew what they were, but Fraser'd dragged him down, the first year, and made him look), and moose even. And sun—god, he loved the sun, he'd go outside every year as soon as it was even remotely warm enough and just spend hours in the sun, breathing in the smells of snow and mud and evergreens. He totally got why Fraser loved spring so much, up here. (Not to mention the fact that his libido came out of hibernation and he and Fraser were suddenly screwing every day, just about, frenzied and hungry. It was like this total affirmation of life or something: _I survived, I survived, I survived.)_

And so he figured he'd survive the third winter, too, somehow. He knew it wasn't gonna be a picnic, but—he'd gotten through the first two winters, through the grace of God and Benton Fraser, so he figured he could handle anything. He'd learned that exercising helped a lot and that sun-lamps were pretty much the best invention ever, so he was—well, if not entirely thrilled with the idea, at least as ready as he'd ever be. He was prepared; he'd seen the worst the Territories could throw at him.

Except that, as far as that went—he was wrong. There was a heat wave that winter, or so Fraser said, at least; as far as Ray was concerned, negative temperatures were negative temperatures. But all the kids were thrilled; it was warm enough to actually be outside, so pretty soon the lawn in front of the detachment was covered with snowmen and the hill behind the church had sled-tracks all over it. And hey, Ray was pretty pleased himself—right up until the morning when Fraser got the first reports of open water on the lake.

At first they weren't too concerned: the kids were in school, and the adults all knew better than to go out on the ice during a warm snap. So Ray tossed another log on the woodstove, and Fraser made a pot of coffee, and they sat down to read the paper together before heading off to work. But then Fraser's radio crackled, and Adam Calhoun from the fire department was saying something about a missing snowmobile and Fraser started to look worried and went out to start the truck. And when Fraser leaned in to kiss him goodbye and said he was going in to work early—"I'm sure it's nothing, Ray, but better safe than sorry"—Ray thought for a moment and then grabbed his parka and went in to town with Fraser. 'Cause maybe Fraser was right and maybe it was nothing—but maybe Ray'd been wrong about about the warm weather being a good thing, after all.

And then he was standing on the bank of the lake, the lake where he took his kids to go swimming in the summertime, standing there silently with Maureen MacDonald who was frantic because that was her snowmobile there by the birch trees, and there were tracks on the part of the ice that was thick enough to bear weight. And it was a beautiful blue day; the sun was brilliant on the snow and the chickadees were calling, and it was too beautiful a day for a kid to drown, but he knew it could have happened, he could picture it, all too clearly. And Maureen was terrified, and there was nothing he could say, so he stood there shivering in the snow next to her and thought about winter and ice on the lake and Timmy MacDonald who they couldn't find.

And then Fraser was coming over to them, calling to Maureen that it was okay, it was okay, they'd found him, he'd been with Toonoo Kenojuak getting gasoline for the snowmobile, and Maureen was sobbing in his arms, and he couldn't stop shaking. And eventually they all scattered their separate ways, and Maureen went home to Timmy, and Ray went back to work and spent the afternoon teaching his kids the number-words. But the whole time all he could think about was the sun, brilliant on the water, and the color of the ice there at the edge of the lake. And he'd thought he'd seen the worst of the Territories, but he couldn't get over the idea that sometimes the springtime was just as vicious as the winter, that you could survive the blizzards and the ice storms and the fifty-fucking-below and it'd be the warmth that would kill you. It was a miracle that they survived at all, up here, a fucking miracle. Timmy hadn't died, but he could have, and he still could. Or Fraser could, or Ray, or _any_ of them could, and life would go on, implacable. And he'd known that, but he hadn't _known_ that, not really.

He thought he was okay with it; he'd been a cop, for god's sake, he'd seen death, he'd been fucking _intimate_ with death. But a few days later, when the cold had come back and they'd been snowed in again, he was lying there with Fraser's arms around him and suddenly he was shaking, and okay, maybe he wasn't as comfortable with it as he'd thought. 'Cause this wasn't Chicago, this was like no place he'd ever been, it was cold and stark and savage and utterly, utterly wild, and death lurked around every corner. And there was nothing Fraser could say to make Ray feel better, because it was true—the fact they were alive at all was a miracle, in a place like this, and Fraser _knew_ that.

But maybe Fraser was right, and the miracle wasn't that they _were_ surviving but that they _could,_ they _could_ live, they could even _thrive_ up here, even with the cold and the ice and the million other ways to die. They _could_ survive, and that meant that life won, in the end. So he lay there and let Fraser murmur to him, voice soft and urgent in his ear: _you will die, and I will die, but I love you, Ray, I love you, never forget that,_ and he fell asleep thinking of the winter night wrapping around them, keeping them safe.


End file.
